Acora invited to Microsoft Northern European Data Centre in Dublin

As a key Microsoft partner, Acora were delighted to receive an invite to visit Microsoft’s Northern campus in Dublin. The recently expanded Dublin data centre provides hosting for the full range on Microsoft services including Azure, Office 365 and Xbox Live. This is public cloud compute on an industrial scale with economy of effort, extensive security controls, resilience and exponential scalability baked into the ecosystem.

Acora’s newly appointed cloud architect Craig Hurt, who heads up Acora’s technical team, was delighted to take up the opportunity. Craig has over 20 years’ experience in the commercial IT outsourcing sector, having worked with a number of blue chip enterprise customers across numerous market verticals during this time. He is a passionate technologist and cloud advocate dedicated to providing Acora’s mid-market customers with innovative and agile technical solutions to today’s business requirements.

Craig, commenting on the enormity of the security measures in place:

“Physical security is of paramount importance, and Microsoft’s defence in depth approach is visible throughout the data centre in the form of airport scanners, CCTV and biometrics. Access is on a strictly need-to-know basis, and is rigorously enforced – it’s physical role-based access control (RBAC) for the data centre.”

At this hyper-scale level, data centres are themselves becoming consumables; it is more cost-effective to tear down legacy builds and start again rather than retrofitting the latest evolutionary design into the existing infrastructure. New data centre builds have a lower life expectancy than most on premise compute assets. They can be torn down and spun quickly (in relative terms) and are incredibly efficient, highlighted by the constantly decreasing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratings. Microsoft have invested heavily in their global data centre architecture, and continue to lead innovation in this space. There are even rumours that Microsoft’s next generation data centres could be located underwater!